The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Currently available mapping systems allow users to search for points of interest within a map field of view. These mapping systems compare the current field of view and the search term against a database of points of interest. The mapping system plots the points of interest containing the search term within the current field of view. These mapping systems suffer from only plotting results on the map that match the wording contained in the search and may, for example, return results unrelated to the user's search. For example, if a user searches for “coffee” the search results would only include points of interest named “coffee”, and would exclude points of interest that may have the best coffee in town. These mapping systems may also suffer from displaying all of the search results within the map field of view without prioritizing the points of interest. However, there may be many points of interest containing the word “coffee” if the user zooms to a full view of a city.
Other mapping systems allow users to search with a category of points of interest within a map field of view. For example, a user could search for a particular category such as “coffee” and the mapping system compares the search category and the map field of view against a database of points of interest within that particular search category. While this system may include points of interest with higher relevance because system performs the search by categorization, if the system categorizes the points of interest incorrectly, or a particular point of interest has many categories, the search results become less relevant for the user. Furthermore, depending on the field of view of the map, there may be many points of interest that match the search category, and the system may display more results than the user needs or can process. In more sophisticated mapping systems, the mapping system ranks search results based on the distance from geographic center of the map field of view. However, using the center of the map field of view above may not meet the needs of the user. For instance, if the user does not have the map centered on the particular area they wish to search, the user may need to take the additional step of panning the map to a new location to approximate a geographical reference points to perform the search. Furthermore, a distance-ranking scheme may not capture the best search results for the user. For example, the best coffee shop may only be two miles away, but a distance ranking search result may provide nearby search results of a supermarket and a gas station that both sell coffee.
Some electronic mapping systems provide the ability to interact with a point of interest within a map field of view, such as interacting with a point of interest to bring up a phone number or an address. Other systems may capture user reviews of points of interest, such as restaurant reviews, and may include the ability to provide a map of the point of interest. These systems may include the ability to search for particular categories of points of interest within a map and then display user reviews of the point of interest based on user interaction with the map. Social networking systems may provide individual users the ability to indicate that they visited points of interest, and social networks may determine a level of relatedness of individual users to other individual users.